The Quota Quotient

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Kaveree Bamzai

May 17, 2010

ISSUE DATE: May 17, 2010

UPDATED: May 17, 2010 00:00 IST

Shashi Tharoor was done in by old India uneasy about the rise of new India which he symbolised with his tweeting and hair-tossing. Sunanda Pushkar was pilloried because she was an independent working woman who was not only beautiful, according to her estimation, but also a devoted single mother. A. Raja is being hounded because he is a Dalit and not because he is a well-connected politician in charge of a very important ministry. I am sure Madhuri Gupta must be working on her defence as well. Perhaps she is being investigated because she is a single Urdu-speaking woman who also drinks, as TV channels have not stopped telling us, carrying that one picture of her downing what looks like sherbet from a wine glass.

Quotas have for long been the last refuge of the discredited. But of late the Quota Quotient has assumed epidemic proportions. Adults in public life seem to have developed an inability to take responsibility for their actions. Everyone, from the IPL Governing Council to the Government, needs a scapegoat. If everything that is wrong with cricket is because of Lalit Modi, then everything that bleeds in tribal India is because of Arundhati Roy. It's the infantilised culture of complaint that art critic Robert Hughes said had led to the fraying of America, where intellectual disagreement is equated with personal attack. In a country like India with even more sub-cultures than melting pot America, it has even more truth. Everything is someone else's fault, and there's a lot of fault-finding to be done. If there's joblessness in Maharashtra, it's because of outsiders. If there is an honour killing by a mother in Jharkhand, it's because women are being over-educated. And if children are being sexualised, it's because of too much television and excessive Internet. Perhaps it's to be expected in a nation that does not believe in culpability. Where crimes are usually swept under the Persian carpeted floor. Which has a history of looking for the enemy without, from Dadabhai Naoroji's drain of wealth theory to Indira Gandhi's foreign hand hysteria.

But as people begin to use modern instruments of transparency, from the Right to Information Act to Twitter, and question its public figures, it will be increasingly difficult to hide behind political correctness. Equally it will be tough for the quota quotient-ers to create and nurture constituencies based on divisive lines. Separate a Shibu Soren from his almost mythical monopoly over tribal sentiment in Jharkhand and you have just another venal politician. Split Mayawati from her Dalit constituents, and there's just another politician battling allegations of corruption. Quota politics encourages quota camouflage, the enemy of an open society. Time to put a lid on it.

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